FluidRay RT enters free beta

The developers of FluidRay RT have released a free beta of the real-time physically based renderer.

FluidRay RT is based on Intel’s open-source Embree kernels, which facilitate ray tracing on the CPU, thereby removing the scene memory limit that many GPU-based renderers encounter.

Aside from that, we don’t have a lot of information about the software: it has the basic range of features you would expect, although there’s no animation support yet; and imports OBJ files via a free plugin.

The new beta is time-limited to 30 days, but you can renew automatically up until the software’s commercial release. You can also buy the beta for $299, which gives you a free update to version 1.0.

Updated 4 January 2012: FluidRay RT 0.8.1 has just been released, adding support for Mac OS X as well as Windows (though only 64-bit systems, for now). You can read a full list of new features on here.